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How to get Home?

Getting rid of the only button the iPhone has had on its front since day one might be a gamble – the functions are vital to the experience and every single iPhone user out there has a muscle memory that tells them to press it to get back to the app selection screen.

That’s all gone in the iPhone X.

The home button performed two important functions - a tap took you to the home screen, but the integrated fingerprint sensor unlocked the phone, too.

Apple has replaced these functions with two new features – Face ID to unlock, and a series of gestures to navigate.

Face ID

The first thing to say about Face ID is that it works flawlessly and without error. At least in the short time I’ve been testing it.

It uses the complex hardware built into the notch at the top of the screen. There’s a camera in there, but there’s a whole lot more too – a flood illuminator, an infra red sensor, and a dot projector. These work together to enable depth sensing in images that make Face ID (and Portrait mode on the front as well as back sensor) work, even in the dark.

It’s simple to set up (two passes at scanning your face) and you’re good to go.

I would say it’s marginally slower than Touch ID, but there’s not much in it, and once the novelty of it wears off, which it does quite quickly, you start to forget it’s there, just like you did with the older iPhones’ fingerprint sensor.

The gesture to return home (and leave the lock screen) is to swipe up from the bottom.

Apple says Face ID is more secure than Touch ID, too – the chances of a random person picking up your phone an unlocking it with face ID are 1 in 1,000,000, as opposed to 1 in 50,000 with Touch ID, although I have to admit I have no idea whatsoever how they arrived at these numbers.

Gestures

Some of the things you used to do with the home button are now done with swipes on the screen. You used to swipe up to bring up the control centre… now that happens when you swipe down from the top right of the screen.

Swiping up and holding invokes the multitasking app switcher (which used to show up when you double-tapped the home button). And there’s also a little horizontal stripe across the bottom of each app which you can swipe to switch between apps.

To invoke Siri, you can long-press on the sleep/wake button on the right. That might sound a little bit more confusing than it really is – it all makes sense when actually using it.

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Animoji

A fun feature the True Depth camera on the phone makes possible are Animojis. These are essentially a series of face-like Emojis that you can invoke in the Messages app.

As you talk and move your facial features, the on-screen character mirrors everything you do. You can take snaps of the facial expressions (which can be quite uncanny), make stickers out of them, or record short clips of video, which can then be shared with others.

You have everything the iPhone 8 can do, and more. You have the great design, the wireless charging, the powerful processors, the sensational camera, and, of course, you have iOS on which it’s all built.

The more is a simply fabulous screen, the incredible True Depth camera that makes Face ID and Portrait mode on the front camera possible, and a smaller form factor with a much bigger screen. I think it’s a winner. The best iPhone yet.

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Where can I buy the iPhone X? Where are the best deals?

You can buy the phone outright on Apple's website for £999, or pay for it in monthly instalments of £47.95 over the course of two years.

EE's best-selling plan for the iPhone X costs £82.99 per month, plus £9.99 for the handset. You get 100GB of data, unlimited minutes and texts and a free pair of BeatsX headphones worth £129.95. EE's contract is for 24 months.

Three has 11 different plans to choose from, its most advertised one costs £68 per month, users will get unlimited calls and texts as well as 12GB of data. There is a £78 upfront cost too.

Meanwhile a contact with o2 comes with an upfront cost of £29.99, and the cheapest tariff costs £83 which comes with unlimited call and texts as well as 50GB of data.

If you go with Vodafone , pay an upfront cost of £300 and £56 a month for the tariff - it comes with 40GB of data, an extra 10GB of 4G data, a three month free trail of online safety programme Secure Net and unlimited calls and texts.